Lillian Cunningham:
In 1918, there was a huge parade in Philadelphia, a kind of political rally, really. It was September 28th, a clear fall Saturday. Warplanes and weapons and marching bands floated their way down Broad Street, one of Philadelphia's main arteries. American flags swayed with the wind.

It was called the Liberty Loan Parade. There were actually a ton of Liberty Loan Parades held across the country at the same time. But this one in Philadelphia was one of the biggest. The city organized the parade to drum up morale and, more importantly, money for World War I. It was an idea devised by President Woodrow Wilson's administration.

Every major U.S. city and region was expected to sell a certain number of liberty bonds issued by the Treasury Department. Citizens would buy these bonds from their personal savings. The government would get an influx of money for the war effort, and then it would promise to pay Americans back. The Wilson administration expected the city of Philadelphia to raise $500 million in liberty bond sales in the fall of 1918, thus the big parade.

Government ads and fliers urged Philadelphians to come out that fall Saturday. And they did. 200,000 people crowded the streets. They watched the military floats go by, and they chanted songs. And in the midst of it all, they were approached to buy war bonds. It was a master class in the psychology of patriotism.

Only three days later, though, an entirely different scene blanketed Philadelphia. Gone was the intoxicating, positive energy of the parade. In its place was pandemic. Church bells tolled throughout the city as people started dying. Bodies began to literally pile up in the streets, streets that just days before had burst with life and song. A virus had torn through the parade crowd like shrapnel. It was a strain of influenza unique in how quickly it could incubate and how deadly it could be, even in young, healthy adults.

The average age of those who died from it was 28 years old. It caused fevers, vomiting, then led to pneumonia, organ failure, and death. In some cases, people died within 24 hours. And the thing was, the U.S. government had known about it, had known that it was brewing, had known that mass gatherings, like the parade, would feed its spread. But selling the war, selling liberty itself, had been more important than warning people of the risks.

Ultimately, 675,000 Americans would die from influenza. Yet not once -- not once -- did President Wilson ever say a single word about the virus, about its death toll, even about its very existence. Why?

I'm Lillian Cunningham with The Washington Post, and this is a special episode of "Presidential."
Pres. Richard Nixon:
I resign the presidency, effective at noon tomorrow.
Pres. John F. Kennedy:
What your country can do for you.
Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt:
A date which will live in infamy.

Lillian Cunningham:
How had President Woodrow Wilson handled the 1918 flu pandemic? I got curious about that question soon after coronavirus began tearing through the United States. The 1918 influenza was the deadliest pandemic in modern history. It arrived around the same time World War I was ending, and the virus killed roughly 50 million people worldwide. That's more than three times the number of deaths from World War I itself. But the thing was, even though I did a whole presidential episode on Wilson, his leadership in the face of that pandemic hadn't come up at all. Why was that?

I started looking back through notes, doing some more research, and it turns out I hadn't overlooked something back then. It's that there really was no story about Wilson navigating the pandemic. He took no action to combat the virus as president. But in searching for what his leadership would've been, I actually was led down the path to a different story that was buried underneath, one that helped explain the absence of his leadership. It's a story about the White House, information control, and fake news.

Vanessa Northington Gamble:
You learn a lot about American history through studying epidemics.

Lillian Cunningham:
This is Vanessa Northington Gamble. She's the University Professor of Medical Humanities at George Washington University.

Vanessa Northington Gamble:
We find out about presidential leadership. You learn how disease is written into our public policy. But you also find out a lot about race and ethnicity.

Lillian Cunningham:
Pandemics give us a lens into our country at its most vulnerable. They show us whether, with the armor pulled off, America is, indeed, living up to its constitutional ideals, whether that's an ideal like equality or the First Amendment. To see this, you can go all the way back to the very beginning of our country. In 1793, only two years into George Washington's first term as president, yellow fever broke out in Philadelphia. Philadelphia was then the temporary capital.

Vanessa Northington Gamble:
And this epidemic comes and almost wipes out the city.

Lillian Cunningham:
As president during this time, George Washington's response was to flee. He returned to his home in Mount Vernon, Virginia. Thomas Jefferson retreated to his Virginia home, as well. Alexander Hamilton got sick and then also escaped from the city. So, who took care of all the sick people? Who actually stepped in to handle the crisis, if not the president and the administration?

Vanessa Northington Gamble:
Black people were taking care of the sick. They were burying the dead. It was believed that Black people did not get yellow fever. And so since there was this belief that Black people did not get yellow fever, many Black people stayed behind to take care of white Philadelphians.

Lillian Cunningham:
Of course, everyone could get yellow fever. It was carried by mosquitoes. But that wasn't known at the time. Two of the people coordinating the aid efforts were prominent Black church leaders, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones. They urged their parishioners to help.

Vanessa Northington Gamble:
And one of the things why Absalom Jones and Richard Allen pushed the Black community to care for their white brethren was they wanted to get their rights as citizens, and that did not happen.

Lillian Cunningham:
In the fall of 1793, 10% of Philadelphia's population ended up dying from the virus. Many of those were Black nurses and people who were too poor to flee the city. The outbreak ended only because the onset of colder weather killed off mosquitoes. By mid-November, the plague was considered officially over, but it was December before Washington felt comfortable enough to move back to the president's house in Philadelphia.

In the 125 years or so between George Washington and Woodrow Wilson, there were other disease outbreaks, like tuberculosis and polio, and most of these were also met with little response from the White House. No president had really considered virus control or even public health more broadly as a part of his job. Now, this was largely a function of the way the presidency was designed from the outset. There was nothing in the Constitution that said a president had to be responsible for the health of the population. In fact, there's really not much in the Constitution about the role beyond that the president can appoint positions and negotiate treaties and make occasional recommendations to Congress.

So, throughout much of the 1800s, the presidency was a relatively weak role. But the 1918 influenza burst into American life on such a disastrously different scale that it seemed impossible for Wilson to ignore it. Plus, in many ways, Wilson's presidency was on a different scale, too. From the moment he entered the White House, Wilson was intent on expanding the reach of executive power, and that intent further deepened when the United States entered World War I during Wilson's second term, in the spring of 1917.

Announcer:
It came at last -- war.
Man:
[ Singing ] Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun. Take it on the run, on the run, on the run.

Lillian Cunningham:
This was about a year and a half before the military parade in Philadelphia became a super spreader for influenza, but already you could see a president who was solidifying his authority and control as the U.S. joined the war effort. Wilson controlled information to a degree never before seen in the American presidency.

Within a week of entering the war, Wilson approved the creation of something called the Committee on Public Information. To put it bluntly, this was a propaganda arm of the American government. It did things like create press releases and stories that put a positive spin on the war that were then planted in newspapers. It created war posters like the iconic one I'm sure you've seen of Uncle Sam, his finger in the face of the person looking at the poster, and the words, "I want you for the U.S. Army."

This arm of the government also orchestrated public campaigns to buy liberty bonds, like the parade in Philadelphia. George Creel ran the committee. He once described his goal as turning the American public into, quote, "a white-hot mass." He wanted them fired up about the war with, again, quote, "fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination."

Psychological research was a relatively new field at the time, and the Committee on Public Information marked one of the earliest efforts to twist psychology's insights toward specific ends. Committee staffers studied concepts like herd instinct and psychological warfare, and then they constructed information campaigns that were designed specifically to inspire or scare or guilt-trip or peer-pressure the American public.

Announcer:
The latest news from the front is chilling. It is a fight to the finish, and it is up to us.

Lillian Cunningham:
It worked.

Announcer:
Let's do our share.

Lillian Cunningham:
The committee's propaganda efforts were so effective that citizens, newspapers, businesses would take it upon themselves to create their own patriotic messaging.
Man #2:
The test of good citizenship is loyalty to country.
Man #3:
Our only path ought to be our own blessed flag flying.

Lillian Cunningham:
The committee and its techniques would eventually give birth to the advertising and the public-relations industries that would transform 20th-century America. But in the meantime, perhaps the most illuminating quote about the committee on public information and the tactics it was using comes from Arthur Bullard, the man who convinced Wilson to create the committee in the first place. And he explained it this way. Quote, "Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms." He went on, "The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false."

John Barry:
Everything was focused on the war with an intensity unlike any other period in American history and an effort to control thought unlike any other period in American history, including the McCarthy scare.

Lillian Cunningham:
This is John Barry, a historian and author of "The Great Influenza."

John Barry:
The Justice Department created the American Protective League, which had no legal basis whatsoever, but they gave them badges, and they went out, and 200,000 Americans spied on their fellow citizens.

Lillian Cunningham:
The American Protective League was technically a private vigilante organization, but it operated under the explicit approval of the Justice Department and the attorney general. These were average citizens who acted as though they were undercover government agents. They would surveil and even round up people who they suspected had dodged the draft or were opposed to the war or really in any way seemed un-American. In addition to creating this citizens policing other citizens program, there were also new laws passed that made it easier for the government to punish people who said things it didn't want said.

Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act into law in 1917, shortly after U.S. entry into the war. Among other things, it empowered the Postmaster General to confiscate mail and to refuse to deliver it if it criticized the administration in any way. In 1918, a bit later, Wilson signed into law the Sedition Act, which made it unlawful to publish anything critical of the government.

John Barry:
And he had an attorney general who demanded the Librarian of Congress report names of people who asked for certain books. He said the government needed to monitor, quote, "the individual casual or impulsive disloyal utterances."

Lillian Cunningham:
But a lot of the time, legal action wasn't even needed. Society responded to this combination of threats and patriotic propaganda by self-censoring and self-policing. Wilson had created an administration and, by extension, an American society that largely put free speech and truth below victory.

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